Wes swallowed and glanced down, avoiding my gaze. “Something sinister. Do you know what it is?”
“No. I just…I think Atlas might have been right,” I said. “I’m not sure we should?—”
“Right about what?” Atlas said, suddenly walking into the kitchen to take his spot across from me. He stretched his arms over his head and yawned before grabbing the carafe of coffee between us to pour himself a mug.
“How are you feeling about last night?” I asked, pretending not to notice the apparent tension between them. Wes wouldn’t look at him, and Atlas had barely glanced at his brother.
“Fine,” Atlas said. “Great. Spectacular.”
“No lingering side effects?” I raised my eyebrows, surprised that he hadn’t had the same terrifying release as Wes and me.
Atlas straightened and finally looked at his brother. “What? What am I missing?”
“Something’s wrong,” I added. “There’s something we missed. It’s like…” I struggled to put it into words. It twisted in my gut like food poisoning, like I might heave and wretch and still not purge it.
Wes tilted his head to one side, cracking his neck before doing the same on the other.
“What happens in the liminal stays in the liminal, right?” Atlas raised his eyebrows. “We said we wouldn’t make more of it than it needed to be, and honestly, you both were fucking hot. I’ve never come so hard in my life.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks, and I tried to hide my smile. I could say the same thing, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. Atlas was almost unhinged last night, drunk with dominance and magic. And Wes had begged his brother to fuck him like his literal life depended on it.
“Then what did you mean?” Atlas asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something else there. Another presence, maybe.”
It wanted, it clawed, and it wriggled around in my soul like a maggot in a vat of rotten meat.
“Another presence? That sounds ominous,” he said. “Are you saying you fucked up the spell you didn’t know anything about in the first place?”
“Oh, fuck off, Atlas.” I groaned. “I’m tired, and fighting about it isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
He scoffed and rolled his eyes, but dropped the issue.
“I’ve never felt like that before in a ritual,” I said. “You might have been right about holding off for a bit. Maybe we should?—”
“I’m sorry, what?” Atlas barked, shifting his glare to his brother. “We get this far, we swap blood and flesh and cum, and now you want to hold off?”
Deafening silence fell between us. I didn’t have a response to his outburst. I didn’t know what to say.
“We’re running out of time. You said so yourself. Día de Muertos starts tonight,” Atlas snarled. “It’s too late to turn back.”
“Atlas,” Wes cut in.
“I want to get out of here,” Atlas snapped. “I don’t care what the fuck we awakened in that damned library. You convinced me this was what we had to do, so we’re doing it.”
He was panting by the time he was done, and his frustration echoed straight down the bond into my soul. But there was more to it, a fury he might not have even been aware of. Whatever strange presence I felt, it was in him, too. It was in all of us.
“What’s next?” Atlas rubbed a hand over his face and back into his hair.
I sighed. “The soul binding. Tonight. I’m still not sure how we’ll react to it.” I glanced at the table between us. “But we’re out of time. If we plan to do this when the veil is thinnest, that’s at midnight.”
“Are we ready?” Wes bounced his knee under the table harder, twitching and blinking, biting his fingernails. Had he always done that? I was about to ask him what was wrong, but I never got it out.
A loud blast burst my eardrums, and the windows shattered, shooting glass fragments across the room. I ducked and curled my hands over my head to protect myself, and when I glanced up again, dark obsidian swirls spiraled in thick, angry clouds outside. They beat against the side of the estate, thundering for entry, wailing on the wards.
“Fuck, we have to move.” Atlas stood and rushed around the table, grabbing Wes’s hand before latching onto mine to drag us into the hallway. We raced past the library into the parlor, coming to an abrupt stop when we realized the magic surrounding us had faltered.
Wisps of smoke poured in from the broken windows as the energy that was supposed to protect the house splintered. It cracked as the cloud invaded it, sizzling and electrifying, sending terror through my bloodstream.
